Written sources greatly extend the scope of the evidence for Egypt, but in
specific areas of life, each with specific histories of writing from the time
of the development of Egyptian scripts in the late fourth millennium BC. In
order to use any written evidence productively, its context must be borne in
mind, and it is important to recognise the gaps in the surviving record, and
therefore the limits to this source of information. The tables on this page
offers a very general introduction to the variety of written content in Egyptian
scripts currently available for each period.

The hieroglyphic script was regularly deployed
with formal art; the sacred script and art are
interwoven, creating a specific world for inscription - a horizon of eternity.

Categories of content

The vast quantities of manuscript and inscription from ancient Egypt can of
course be divided in any number of ways. The seven broad categories proposed
here are those suggested by study of the papyrus fragments from the late Middle
Kingdom town at Lahun (from roughly 1850 to
1750 BC), applied to all three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history. For
each category the table offers one example from the Petrie Museum, or the comment
'examples' where examples are preserved elsewhere but not present in the Petrie
Museum.

administrative

legal

letters

healing

religious

literary

treatises

3000-2000 BC

UC 32769

examples

UC 16244

examples

UC 14540

2000-1500 BC

UC 32097A

UC 32037

UC 32203

UC 32057

UC 32157

UC 32773

UC 32134A

1500-1000 BC

UC 32795

UC 19641

UC 32782

UC 39673

UC 8446

UC 39614

examples

1000-500 BC

UC 33179

examples

examples

UC 14693

examples

examples

500 BC-AD 200

UC 71101

UC 71105

UC 31906

UC 16546

UC 32374

UC 32423

UC 54961A-D

This table could be broken down into narrower groupings of content and less
abstract general periods. This would expose more gaps, such as the following:

in the literary category, love-songs
are preserved only from 1300-1100 BC

legal documents are only found after 2500 BC, and until 1850 BC only in
copies within hieroglyphic inscriptions

no prescription or treatment manuscripts survive before 2000 BC

in the category of treatises, only word-lists survive between 1200 and 400
BC - there are no mathematical or astronomical manuscripts from those 800
years